


Out of Time

by devovere



Series: Intimacies [8]
Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Episode: s02e25 Resolutions, F/M, History, Long Live Feedback Comment Project, POV First Person, Present Tense, Sunsets, Time - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-10
Updated: 2018-05-10
Packaged: 2019-05-04 22:46:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,105
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14603367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/devovere/pseuds/devovere
Summary: Chakotay and Kathryn watch a sunset together and think about time.





	Out of Time

**Author's Note:**

> Heartfelt thanks to three beta-readers who all made invaluable contributions. Killermanatee told me to write this story in the first place, affirmed my instincts, and helped with flow and balance. Klugtiger polished the language and punctuation and drove me to thoroughly revise one hopelessly convoluted paragraph. Caladenia pressed me to clarify my underlying thoughts about Chakotay’s character and backstory and subtly strengthened the physical blocking of a story in which both characters sit almost unmoving on a blanket. 
> 
> I’ve made substantive changes since any of these dedicated editors saw their draft, and so all remaining errors and weaknesses are absolutely mine alone.

  1.  Chakotay



We settle on a blanket facing west, resting shoulder to shoulder. Kathryn is glowing after our climb, or maybe that’s just what the early evening light does to her complexion. Or maybe it’s how I see her. 

Or -- hopefully -- how I make her feel. Alive, vibrant, filled with possibilities. 

There’s something about a sunset .... Growing up, I’d watch the sun set over the lake near our village. I was impatient every time for the stars to come out, as impatient as I was to go build a life among them. Time dragged then, dragged me down, imprisoning me in the gravity well of Dorvan, the People, my father’s expectations. 

From my years as a cadet I remember clearly only one sunset. Wilderness survival training, second year. The cadets in my squad let it be known they felt no need to study hard. “We have our very own Indian to keep us alive! Right, Chak? What’s a couple of nights in the forest when you’ve grown up living off the land?” Like my people squatted somewhere without homes, tools, or any knowledge of modern science and technology. 

They meant well, I suppose. I didn’t, quite. I was angry, though perhaps not primarily with them. Anyway, I’d forgotten how to start a fire, or maybe I’d never mastered the technique at all. Maybe I failed on purpose, to teach them not to assume they knew me or my culture. I was seventeen -- who knows what I meant? 

That sunset, which I found some distance from our campsite, promised a cold and dark night ahead, to match the chilly disregard I now felt from my squadmates. One girl found me there, leaning against an outcropping that overlooked the valley and the mountain range beyond. I don’t remember her name, only that she offered me comfort, the warmth of her sleeping bag, her embrace. But I took it to be pity, or lust for the exotic, the primitive offworlder, and brushed her off. 

My next home with regular sunsets came two decades later, when I took the teaching appointment back at the Academy. Like many faculty there, I saw it as a sabbatical from life in space, a breather between career stages. I had come to crave fresh air, an ocean, room to stretch that wasn’t on a holodeck. The rhythms of natural light and seasons. More than a shore leave could satisfy. 

There was a woman, too. It’s hard to imagine now, but I did love before Kathryn. It might have worked out, if we’d shared politics like we shared a bed: generously, trustingly. 

Rose couldn’t accept my growing sympathy for the Maquis. She was a good historian, but her politics were conservative, Earth-centric. What she called  _ realistic _ . I didn’t call them anything, preferring to avoid discussions that I knew would end in disagreement. The lack of trust went both ways. 

My last evening on Earth, six days after news of my father’s death reached me, she took me to the beach. We walked as the sun set over the water, and she told me she would not follow me to Dorvan at the end of term after all. 

I think Rose knew before I did that I wouldn’t be returning. That Kolopak’s violent death at the hands of my people’s occupiers would inevitably cause to surface in me a burden of duty that, up to then, I’d been able to view as abstract, remote, inert. 

I’d seen our history of genocide and oppression as the business of those who, like my father, had cared more about our past than about what Federation thinking called the future. To my father, the future and the past were never all that separate. 

My object lesson in that worldview was his murder. 

As if she is reading my thoughts, Kathryn sighs. I lie down on the blanket with my head in her lap. Her fingers in my hair soothe my heart’s pain. 

So now I am here, with Kathryn, truly trapped in a gravity well, on a planet we’re calling New Earth. She didn’t think to ask, but even if she had, I wouldn’t call it New Dorvan. I’m no longer running from my people and their history, but the two of us, here, are not a part of that tale. 

Skin color, language, and culture notwithstanding, I am not Kathryn’s exotic acquisition, and she is not my conqueror. Neither of us is abandoning our kin to join with the other’s. Having shed our pips, neither of us dominates now. 

We just are, we two, and so we ever shall be: removed from history. The sun -- a sun, anyway -- still rises and sets. The seasons will still turn; two months since  _ Voyager _ left us here, we are now at this latitude’s midsummer. We will age. Someday, hopefully long from now … hopefully not too far apart … we each will die. 

In all other respects, it is as if we exist outside of time. 

A new kind of peace, for this warrior, this child of stars and sky spirits. 

I drift in that peace, almost disembodied, lost in the sunset and Kathryn’s quiet companionship. 

This week I made a hammock of bed sheets and hung it outside the shelter, where there is shade in the heat of the day. The hammock is a revelation to Kathryn. Not the fact of what it is, a length of fabric suspended like a sling between two sturdy trees, but rather the experience of one. How you can climb into it, set yourself gently swaying, and be lulled into a doze in midafternoon. How the rhythm as it rocks mimics some primal memory every human being must share: the sensation of being carried in our mother’s womb as she walked through the days of her pregnancy. Time stops, arcs, loses meaning in a hammock. 

She rests a hand on my arm. I wrap the other arm around her waist, holding us close, my ear pressed to her middle, listening to her pulse and breathing and the subtle shifting of her muscles as we rock almost imperceptibly together. 

I made the hammock sturdy enough for two, and then some. Perhaps tonight we’ll climb in it together and see what other primal reflex our swaying produces. If we ever leave this blanket, that is … 

I know our time here can't last forever, but right now it almost feels that way. 

 

  1. Kathryn. 



We settle on a blanket facing west, resting shoulder to shoulder. The climb wasn’t difficult, but it’s the furthest I’ve been from the shelter since the plasma storm. I found myself scanning the skies nervously as we went, but once we reached the overlook and took in the view I forgot about forecasts, probabilities, and climatic conditions. 

Leaning against Chakotay’s solid arm, I simply … exist, for a time. 

It’s remarkable how little of my energy Chakotay’s presence requires. It’s an odd thought to have about the person who occupies my mind more than anyone else has since Justin, or ever will again, I suppose. Most men -- all other men in my experience, unless they were well-behaved underlings -- simply demand attention, no matter the context or relationship. I would count Tuvok as an exception, but technically he always fell into the category of well-behaved underling, though it’s perhaps the most insultingly inaccurate description I could give him. 

I sigh, thinking of Tuvok, wishing him and the crew he now leads well and safe and very, very far from here and the rest of Vidiian space. 

Instead of asking what I’m thinking about, Chakotay slides down to put his head in my lap. I smile and stroke his hair. It gives me something to do with my hands as we sit in silence and watch the sun go down. 

He’s better than I am at sitting still, with all his meditation practice. He’s started consulting his animal guide again. We don’t discuss his sessions -- one doesn’t, as I understand the ritual -- but they must be helping him somehow or I don’t suppose he would bother. Or, perhaps, it’s just something he can do now that he has time. 

It’s an odd phrase: to have time. I’ve never felt that I did; time was the measure of me, sometimes the enemy, rarely a resource, never my friend. Barring the Q, time is the one thing with which every life form must contend: no matter how long-lived, no matter how technologically advanced, we inhabit a timestream, and it always runs dry in the end. 

For our first six weeks here, before the storm, I was flat-out racing against time. Fighting every passing minute in hopes of somehow wresting the answers that could let us leave in time to have any chance at all of ever catching up with  _ Voyager _ . 

Chakotay either didn’t understand or didn’t believe my work would matter in the end … and of course, he was correct; it did not. But while it lasted, there was a certain youthful exhilaration to the whole project. It may not have been sustainable, it may have wrecked me physically and emotionally, it may have yielded nothing, but it was rather fun, actually. 

I had a dream about Q the other night, in which he revealed that our stranding here was all his doing, a little experiment to see what it would take to get me to relax, sleep with Chakotay, enjoy myself. He’d finally grown impatient with my delusions of omnipotence, thinking with a few traps and sensors I could find a cure that all the medical knowledge of the Federation couldn’t produce. “You win!” he proclaimed, thoroughly annoyed with me. “While you hoped, you persisted in denying yourself the least little life. I had to crush your hope to make you happy.” And then he snapped his fingers and we were back on  _ Voyager _ . 

When I woke up in the shelter, in Chakotay’s arms … I was convinced at first that the dream had been real, that Q had visited me, that his actions held some lesson for what I must do to get him to  _ actually _ end this test and send us back to the ship. I even spent some time arguing with myself as to whether the Chakotay with me here, in this Q-created test scenario, was really Chakotay, or whether he was a figment of my imagination made flesh by Q’s limitlessly cruel humor. 

Finally the illusion slipped away, another layer gone in my deep capacity for denial, for stubbornness. This was real, New Earth and Chakotay and our shared bed, and plasma storms and the virus I could not cure. Q had no hand in it; there is no lesson here, no test to pass or fail. 

I cannot clever us off this planet. Scientist, starship captain -- no. I’m a farmer now, and a lover. 

I bring one hand from the blanket to rest atop Chakotay’s arm, grounding myself in his solid and reassuring presence. He holds me close, his hand on my hip anchoring me to this planet, this reality. 

I envy his centeredness, his mellow contentment. His peace. I may get there, someday, and I’m sure he would point out that I’ve made great strides in just the few weeks since the storm. He encourages me into the hammock, thinking more downtime is what I need to be happy. He worries about my stress levels, my tendency to obsession; he’s right, I may just transfer it all to the garden if we’re not both careful. 

But what he doesn’t know -- although I did try to tell him, that night when I talked about the crash -- is that when I stop for too long … when I think too much about questions that are too large to answer … I can end up in a very dark place. Too much idle contemplation, too much freedom from external demands, isn’t good for me. I need to guard against that, and there may come a day when I need his help there, too. I had better discuss it with him, before winter comes and forces me to be even less active. 

It’s good to give myself a deadline for things I would rather not do at all. It’s too easy to put off what is unpleasant, surrounded as we are by paradise, buoyed as I am by his grace and care and love. It would be very easy to get used to all that, to believe life will always be this good here. I must remember that in some ways, time is still my enemy ...

I know our time here can't last forever, but right now it almost feels that way. 

**Author's Note:**

> This story is part of the [LLF Comment Project](https://longlivefeedback.tumblr.com/llfcommentproject), which was created to improve communication between readers and authors. I invite and appreciate feedback, including:
> 
>   * Short comments
>   * Long comments
>   * Questions
>   * Constructive criticism
>   * <3 as extra kudos
>   * Reader-reader interaction
> 

> 
> [LLF Comment Builder](https://longlivefeedback.tumblr.com/post/170952243543/now-presenting-the-llf-comment-builder-beta) may be a useful resource for some. 
> 
> I reply to comments. That means you can expect me to reply to your comment, eventually and barring unforeseen circumstances. (Once in a while I miss or don't receive a notification, for example.) 
> 
> If you _don’t_ want a reply, for any reason, feel free to sign your comment with “whisper.” I will appreciate it but not respond.


End file.
